Mailbag: Please vote yes for Albany gas tax (May 4)

Voters, you have a question on your ballot that has not been asked before in Albany. Yes, you have the choice to support increased maintenance on Albany’s residential streets with a local gas tax of five cents per gallon.

Many other surrounding cities have a street utility fee, which does not require a vote of the electorate. I personally feel you should have the first choice by voting on a gas tax. A gas tax is more fair and equitable than a street utility fee, as the more fuel you use the more you pay. Plus, visitors coming to Albany who access our transportation system will be paying this gas tax.

I have heard many questions to why isn’t existing property taxes paying for street improvements, or why did the city spend funds on a past project? Most city taxes and fees are restricted funds and must be spent on their designated program.

If the current gas tax we receive from the state was adequate to maintain our 187 miles of paved streets throughout the city, our streets would not be in the condition they are today. As per state law, gas tax funds can only be spent on the transportation system.

I do not like a new tax any more than you do, but please believe me, there is no other source of funds to improve the condition of our residential streets. I am open to other solutions or an option other than a tax.

Please, support our community’s needs and help our streets get more pavement life by voting yes for 22-172.

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(8) comments

The only issue I see with the gas tax is that it is used for far more than road maintenance. In Portland they have sucked up a ton of gas tax revenue to build and run their little trains. And no place in Oregon does any form of public transportation cover the cost with the rider fees.

My point about the ise of gas taxes was in general. There is so much of the overall gas tax used for the mass transit that itself does not pay for the use after built.

Portland area is a grand example of that with their little max trains. Bus systems along with the one in Albany are also defective in this area. If you spend money to build a transit system that system should not require gas taxes to run. MY point.

Never happen!! Not as long as we have the CARA millstone around our necks. Not as long as we have the threat of using taxpayer funds to resurrect an ancient hotel and derelict church in a "favored" part of town. Not as long as we have a city government obsessed with the mythologized, idealized long ago past instead of the future.

There you go again... Conflating two very-very different programs. The 5-cent gas tax is not relevant to your diatribe about CARA I "get" that a few folks do not like CARA. I very strongly disagree with any of the points brought up against it. It is patently *obvious* that CARA has worked well overall - in the district that it was designed for. And, thankfully, CARA has a long life & list of things yet to do before it sunsets. The sooner we get off our butts and do them, the sooner that TIF-portion will revert. And, quite thankfully, that |mythologized, idealized long ago past" has proven to be a big boon the downtown!

Ray K writes: “It is patently *obvious* that CARA has worked well overall - in the district that it was designed for.”

There is no conceivable way anyone could know this, because there is no way to know what would have happened had CARA not been foisted upon us. (We can’t observe the parallel universe in which CARA doesn’t exist.) But we certainly know that an oppressed class of citizens is being forced to subsidize a privileged class of citizens in the modern-day master/slave relationship that is CARA, all courtesy of Ray K and his like-minded authoritarians.

I have repeatedly challenged Ray, and his fellow authoritarians, to present research studies showing that cities with URDs outperform cities without them. None have been presented, and I’m pretty certain that none exist. On the contrary, the evidence shows that URDs, at most, just shift developments from their free market locations to locations preferred by busybody officials. These artificial shifts almost certainly damage the overall economic vitality of the affected cities. So, not only are we being enslaved, but it’s for the sake of an utterly bogus cause.

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